tionate lad--and
their joint adventures and mishaps, the window they had broken with a
catapult in India Place, the escalade of the Castle rock, and many
another inestimable bond of friendship; and his hurt surprise grew
deeper. Well, after all, it was only on a man's own family that he could
count: blood was thicker than water, he remembered; and the net result
of this encounter was to bring him to the doorstep of his father's house
with tenderer and softer feelings.

The night had come; the fanlight over the door shone bright; the two
windows of the dining-room where the cloth was being laid, and the three
windows of the drawing-room where Maria would be waiting dinner, glowed
softer through yellow blinds. It was like a vision of the past. All this
time of his absence, life had gone forward with an equal foot, and the
fires and the gas had been lighted, and the meals spread, at the
accustomed hours. At the accustomed hour, too, the bell had sounded
thrice to call the family to worship. And at the thought a pang of
regret for his demerit seized him; he remembered the things that were
good and that he had neglected, and the things that were evil and that
he had loved; and it was with a prayer upon his lips that he mounted the
steps and thrust the key into the keyhole.

He stepped into the lighted hall, shut the door softly behind him, and
stood there fixed in wonder. No surprise of strangeness could equal the
surprise of that complete familiarity. There was the bust of Chalmers
near the stair-railings, there was the clothes-brush in the accustomed
place; and there, on the hat-stand, hung hats and coats that must surely
be the same as he remembered. Ten years dropped from his life, as a pin
may slip between the fingers; and the ocean and the mountains, and the
mines, and the crowded marts and mingled races of San Francisco, and his
own fortune and his own disgrace, became, for that one moment, the
figures of a dream that was over.

He took off his hat, and moved mechanically towards the stand; and there
he found a small change that was a great one to him. The pin that had
been his from boyhood, where he had flung his balmoral when he loitered
home from the Academy, and his first hat when he came briskly back from
college or the office--his pin was occupied. "They might have at least
respected my pin!" he thought, and he was moved as by a slight, and
began at once to recollect that he was here an interloper, in a strang